Gutun Zuria Bilbao reaches its nineteenth edition as the leading benchmark for multidisciplinary creation focused on literature. Each year this International Festival, the city’s longest-standing, forges a bridge between those who write and those who read, turning reading and literature – traditionally an intimate experience – into a shared cultural encounter.
Gutun Zuria Bilbao foregrounds the value of written heritage while simultaneously inviting audiences to explore new narrative forms, whether digital or hybrid. Literature is in a constant state of renewal, and this Festival provides the space in which to discover it. Audiences attend this gathering to engage with their reference authors, but also to encounter and come into close contact with emerging voices and the diversity of contemporary narrative practices. Above all, they come to take part in the conversation about the world we inhabit, a dialogue that unfolds anew every year.
Description:
This year, the Festival is grounded in the conviction that the most forward-looking literature is not that which addresses the future, but rather that which is written the future itself. It is a literature that assumes the future is already taking place today, projecting its dreams and nightmares onto our everyday present. This is a literature that anticipates its time and returns to the past in search of answers to the questions that shape our present.
This year´s edition is devoted to exploring this dimension with an encounter that embraces critical engagement while resisting the temptation to retreat solely into catharsis. We are guided by the conviction that contemporary unease should not only lead us to complaint, but also to proposition. At Gutun Zuria Bilbao we continue to uphold the belief that optimism and the optimal are linked by more than a shared semantic root.
As a Festival, we continue to combine writing with other art forms, and excellence with celebration. We share both the content of what is written and the formal craft of books, exploring their ubiquity and transformations, their dangers and immortality. From paper to screen, from the open page to its countless transformations.
